Greedy Goblin

Wednesday, January 7, 2015

One year of GRR

This was some year! On Jan 9, 2014 I published that I (yes, one player) started a war against the Goon POCO empire in highsec. Like everyone, I believed that CFC is an unstoppable war machine that takes whatever they want and can only be stopped by the N3/PL supercapital armada. No one else can touch them. Yet I hoped to take a few POCOs since they can't guard them all day. That was all the plan: to cause token losses to the CFC to prove that one can fight. Of course people considered even that very modest goal impossible.

A year later, not only CFC lostall of their highsec POCOs, but my one-man project grown into a major damage source to them. They got to the point where they committed real world crime to get me banned and ran a "nice Goons" forum campaign to seduce me to their side.

Let's see the damage numbers, first the highsec side. Here I pay permanent wardecs of Marmite Collective against all CFC members. There was also an attempt to create a highsec anti-CFC swarm, but it wasn't cost effective. Anyway here are the monthly damage numbers of Marmite and Darwin's Lemmings:

You can see that after half year of dying, most CFC members learned to keep out of highsec. They trained NPC alts using several PLEX-es to avoid losing freighters after freighters. Still, there are enough idiots left to provide a stable 120-160B monthly loss, so the highsec wing of the project will keep running.

I'd like you to think about the end result: 2.41T ISK destroyed. That's a big number. To make it understandable, we need a new unit. Let's call it "Rayonar". You probably know the story where a director of a CFC minion was purged and his titan killed because some Goon leader messed up intel. The story doesn't just show the contempt the Goon overlords have for their minions, but serve as a financial unit: the cost of the destroyed titan is 117B. Let's express the highsec GRR wing damage in this unit:

20.5 Rayonars. Irrelevant, isn't it?

After seeing that highsec losses are stabilizing, I looked for a nullsec extension and found Mordus Angels. They are a pirate group, dedicated itself to fight the CFC. They live deep in CFC space, unable to rat in peace or own moons, so SRP wasn't an option. So I started to give them ISK and later a donation board was created. Since its existence 110B was collected, 81B from me. I wish more people would realize how well their money would be used as SRP to MoA. Using an old analysis and the recent monthly CFC losses, here is the monthly damage of MoA against CFC:

You can see that they can take much more fights since they have SRP. So much for "they were killing us always, you pay for nothing". Do you want the graphs keep on growing? Donate! By the way can any of you spot the month when MoA was "hellcamped" by CFC and "couldn't undock"?

Finally, the financial summary. Because fighting a war costs lot of money:

All that ISK was earned by one player. This is the power that trading gives to anyone willing to use his wallet instead of a frig. December seen a bit of dip due to my WoW project, but from now on I can spend about 60-65B/month on the project. I expect Marmite costs decreasing as CFC members keep shrinking and leaving so I'll probably start donating to another nullsec pirate entity. Unless... see post tomorrow!

Finally I'd like to point to the cultural change this project spearheaded. My monthly reports show that most damage is done by small gangs coming from "irrelevant NPC trash". People know that they no longer have to find a huge group to fight. They can just undock and kill CFC solo or with a small gang. Or donate to the fight. The hopelessness that once permeated EVE is and made Goons so happy is gone. The menace of the Evil will be cleansed from New Eden!

28 comments:

Anonymous
said...

You've had no impact. All you have proven is that goons can happily sustain this kind of damage. No, this isn't "primative trolling", it is literally the only conclusion one can draw from your data. 3T isk/m is not enough. Yes there probably *is* a number that is enough. Perhaps 30T a month you might start making an impact.

You also suggest that goons set out to commit a real world crime because of you, when the actions of an individual do not point to the group.

Since goons still stand strong, I really don't see what REAL impact you had. Yes, you did some damage, yet nothing seems to come out of it. Take a look on your stats - 2.41T destroyed and... nothing. This means either the damage was applied where it didn't hurt, or the damage is not high enough.

The damage was obviously not high enough. But that only means I didn't destroy Goons all by myself. Which isn't that surprising. Goons will be destroyed when enough people do what I do. I guess, "enough" is less than 10

It's not that the Goons haven't been destroyed - they aren't even treating you as a serious threat.

Most of the time, they're actually laughing. Articles from this site are linked within the CFC as something to ridicule. The phrase "opportunity cost" was used to represent nonsensical concepts.

And, to be honest, why would they be afraid? MoA can't take their sov. The "pirate" group that tried got manhandled by a single CFC alliance. Marmite Collective won't suddenly go into 0.0 to take space because that'd mean leaving the Jita undock and Uedama gate - and that's too much of a scary concept for them.

For the most part, this "terrible terrible damage" is spread thin among the members. Those big, fat killmails are both idiot ratters (That existed for years and have been killed for years. Really, not kidding here - what's even stranger they exist on both sides and the CFC kills those too. We just don't make a big deal out of it.) or rich people that lose expensive ships.

Not only has this project failed to destroy them as advertised, it failed to even make a dent on their defensive potential.

There are a couple of issues I have to bring up. First of all, it's pretty disingenuous to attribute all kills done by MoA and Marmite to yourself, as they did damage long before you started supporting them. You can say that groups you support do this damage, but you cannot say that you caused all that damage with your donations.

Secondly, you've failed to create a movement or to inspire anyone to follow your lead. Apart from the first few months, you contribute more than 90% of the MoA donations board. Nobody else, as far as I know, have joined in on the grr project in any meaningful way, except for groups receiving money from you.

If your project set out to show that a single person could contribute damage to a null sec alliance, then you'd have succeeded. But when your goal is the complete destruction of the CFC, then you are literally no closer now than a year ago. So in that sense, the project has failed to make any impact at all, other than producing nice statistics and graphs.

"You are self-contradicting. If 30T matters, than I'm contributing 10% of the destruction of Goons. The only way I have no impact if infinite ISK damage wouldn't matter."That's not how it works. It's like if I throw a tiny piece of grit at your leg. It does nothing. The fact that if someone threw a boulder at you it would do something doesn't make the tiny piece of grit have any impact.

"The actions of an individual does point to the group, if the group defends that individual. Can you link a single article on the Goon site that condemned them? Were they kicked from GSF?"They condemned them from the beginning, very publicly. The other thing is, the person who made the twitter account pretending you did it didn't even have anything to do with it. He wasn't even at fanfest. 2 separate things happened. At fanfest a guy douched up the monument. On the internet another guy after hearing about the monument made a twitter account to frame you. They didn't vandalise the monument specifically to get at you.

"The damage was obviously not high enough. But that only means I didn't destroy Goons all by myself. Which isn't that surprising. Goons will be destroyed when enough people do what I do. I guess, "enough" is less than 10"That's never going to happen. Nobody else wants to waste their life grinding isk just to pay for an attack on goons. Especially since even if they lost all of their sov and isk, they would still exist, and likely CCP would make sure they don't get knocked down too far. It will never come to that though as all you are doing is supplying them with the content they want.

"SRP flying line Goons surely laugh on me. The ones who are paying for the SRP (the guys with the JFs and the rattings ships) aren't laughing."You should do your analysis a bit better. Take out the idiot ratters and the personal freighters, and all the other ships invalid for SRP. For the rest of the ships, deduct base insurance returns for the hull. that's the amount it actually costs the SRP team. It will be nowhere near 2.41T.

"I meant that the SRP money comes from upkeeping infrastructure (hauling) and ratting taxes. If the haulers and ratters quit, there won't be money for SRP."They aren't quitting though, are they? If anything they will work even harder to recover their isk to replace their ships.

@Jeremy: the boulder isn't just sum of the rocks, while the damage is sum of damages. It's rather like: getting a needle and steal 100ml of your blood. Does it kill you? No. Repeat it 30 times and you are very dead.

Read the story on the Goon site: the guy making the twitter was there and was banned. He gave the bolt to some drunken kid (who wasn't even playing EVE) to vandalize.

People sit for days waiting for a titan to log in. People grind a lot to have a titan. How are these better than what I did. My way at least works.

I never claimed that I cause reimbursable losses. I cause personal losses to the CFC members who hold the CFC on their shoulders: the haulers and the ratters. As long as CFC can pay SRP, they will always have lolkids pressing F1. Destroy their economy and they are done.

Nobody is denying you did some damage. You did succeed as a person who managed to do damage. But you are overestimating the impact your damage had and you're overestimating people willingness to grid. Simple facts prove it - it's been a year and there is no effect of your campaign. Goons are still the strongest null entity; their members aren't leaving en masse; no entity was created to support your efforts and really challenge them. Also note that grinding for a titan and grinding for, well, no real effect, are two different things. A player can consider flying a titan fun enough to be worth it (although in 100% cases it turns out otherwise), but wasting time to get money, to give it all away, to have nothing positive out of it in return is the opposite of fun and enjoyment. It's like working for someone and having nothing in return. Time is the most valuable resource in the world and most people simply don't want to waste it when having better alternatives. If your project was really having an effect and worth people's time, there would be at least one other person helping you. Yet nobody turned out for a year.

Keep it up mate. What your doing is an inspiration. if only i had your skills in the market to grow my bankroll id be happy to contribute. unfortunately Going by your 10% profit thing you must have near a trill invested a month. Best i could do is 1/10th of that. Not enough to make a dent

"the boulder isn't just sum of the rocks, while the damage is sum of damages. It's rather like: getting a needle and steal 100ml of your blood. Does it kill you? No. Repeat it 30 times and you are very dead."Sure, but if you don't repeat it 30 times, I'd be producing enough blood to not be affected by it, so at the point where it's just you taking 100ml of blood, there's no impact.

I've read the post about the vandalism, and I don't remember the part where they mention the twitter account being made. They certainly didn't vandalise it specifically to frame you, that was just something someone thought would be funny afterwards.

"People sit for days waiting for a titan to log in. People grind a lot to have a titan. How are these better than what I did. My way at least works."People don't just sit there and do nothing else. They will be playing other games or on alts. You dedicate your actual time to fighting goons. There's nothing wrong with that, and you are welcome to spend your time however you wish, but most players will not be willing to dedicate anywhere near that much time just to try to stop goons playing. This is why people find low effort ways for lots people to make a difference rather than trying to get multiple insanely dedicated people.

"I never claimed that I cause reimbursable losses. I cause personal losses to the CFC members who hold the CFC on their shoulders: the haulers and the ratters. As long as CFC can pay SRP, they will always have lolkids pressing F1. Destroy their economy and they are done."But how does it destroy their economy? You aren't doing enough sustained damage to single players to make them quit, so at most you are a temporary inconvenience. What's worse is that to recover they rat more, run more PI and even run low end moons. All of these activities are taxed, so goons make more from them doing this. Honestly, I don't think it's possible to stop income generation enough to halt SRP. Even just the high level traders and market manipulations will be making more than enough to support the CFC long term.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see you succeed, I just think you're being unrealistic when you state how much actual impact you are making.

"@Jeremy: the boulder isn't just sum of the rocks, while the damage is sum of damages. It's rather like: getting a needle and steal 100ml of your blood. Does it kill you? No. Repeat it 30 times and you are very dead."

Actually you can easily survive the loss of 3 litres of blood.

And in any case your problem is that all you do is take 100ml per month.

I was always taught that Eve wars are rarely won in by destroying the enemy's economy or assets base. You win by annoying someone enough that they quit.

Damage caused is a useful metric but very hard to see how effective it is at achieving your ultimate goal. The observed behavioural changes (increased use of outside-corp highsec couriers and reduced ratting in their home systems) show that you are having an impact. The best evidence for your effectiveness would be from core CFC player retention and activity rates. It would be very interesting to see those numbers aligned with your project's metrics.

TL:DR - Damage dealt can be countered by "Doesn't matter, it is nothing to us." Observable reduction in player activity coinciding increased anti-goon operations is harder to argue against (We didn't want that game anyway).

As with all your numbers, from an objective view, the question has to be:

"What were the numbers before you arrived, and has this made any difference at all to goons"

If YOU can individually sustain spending 65B a month in perpetuity, then why cant goons sustain a much higher factor?Where are the numbers showing that Goons are decreasing, or that year on year their activity has changed.

Objectively, you also need to show that the change in behaviour is something that can only be attributed to you, but, that does not make such a good story

For example, you can see that Mordus did ~500B worth of damage to Goons in 2013. So yes, your funding increased that to 1.31T in 2014 but subtracting the difference suggests your contribution only increased their kills by ~800B, not the entire 1.31T.

I'd like to see the same data for Marmite vs Goons in 2013 if possible.

"daniel" raises an interesting point. Some numbers to put this in perspective - base monthly income of r32/64 moons in CFC spaaaaaace, for example - would be highly interesting. Near-complete data on this should be available on dotlan, and a somewhat sophisticated script should be able to extract it if it's not available in pure form. (Average ratting income would of course also be interesting, but likely hard to come by since I don't know of any data source that distinguishes frigates from battleships in rat kills.)

Market manipulation could be an interesting attack vector - I know there's some geographical distribution of moon goo, for example - but there's no one limited group of trade goods you could hit and single-handedly cripple their income, since it's both bottom-up taxes and alliance assets.

Say what you guys want but this is how he wants to play his Eve. And boy is he playing it. I wouldn't say I agree or disagree with his goals. He is one man declaring a war against thousands and they all know his name.

Hell he's more infamous in the CFC than 90% of actual CFC members. That alone deserves some credit.

I see what you are trying to say, but cause someone a headache isn't a success. Paying srp isn't ever going to be a problem for Goons, they have too much income. The most I could see you doing is causing some to frown at dumb loses or poor DC decisions. Unfortunately your spending your own funds to do this. Yet no closer to whatever end game you envisioned. Losing HS Poco's? Not sure that's a massive win.

Killing random ratters and personal jump freighters in high sec really doesn't any negative impact to the CFC at all. Any freighter or JF killed in high sec that is wearing a CFC ticker is a personal JF, not at all related to logistics.

When roaming gangs go through Dek and kill random individual ratters, again, it doesn't do anything to the CFC at all. As a matter of fact, it HELPS the CFC. We, too, have mindless pubbies that are part of the CFC that afk rat all day and don't really contribute. When their ship gets blown up, they can easily afford another out of their personal wallet. Where do they go to buy those ishtars? The CFC trade hub, of course! They purchase goods made by Goons and allies out of our stations with our local resources. So not only do they go out and continue to rat, but they help drive the industrial machine that we have going in the CFC.

So, I guess the CFC should thank you for continuing to drive our industrial backbone. Without your SRP for MOA, we would have less of our own (non-srp) ships destroyed. You're literally replacing the SRP we would have paid out on strategic ops to match the equivalent amount of industrial demand in Dek.

I admire the attempt to "single-handedly" take down an empire. But until you actually start directing the funds to the appropriate actions to actually do damage, then you're only helping the CFC. Sure, a few pubbie CFC members might get angry and quit, but the 99% that stay continue to supply the local demand we need.

What changed my entire attitude towards the CFC, was I was ganking freighters with CODE. and we ganked an afk freighter, it happend to be a CFC alt and he cried and bitched to me and eventually got me kicked from the CFC, best thing that ever happened to me. You are doing good work Gevlon.

You are self-contradicting. If 30T matters, than I'm contributing 10% of the destruction of Goons. The only way I have no impact if infinite ISK damage wouldn't matter.

Clearly, but you are below the threshold value at which that damage starts to complete your goals. I.e. if they can AFFORD 3T loss, you are not impacting them. If they couldn't afford 3T losses you'd be seeing winding back of SRP, increasing taxes etc to cover the losses.. you simply are not seeing that so the conclusion stands.